Netherlands firm shows armed KIA Tasman with counter-drone system

Dutch Military Vehicles introduced the DMV Tasman as the newest addition to its vehicle family this week, presenting the militarized pickup to a select audience from the Netherlands Ministry of Defence and industry partners after months of preparation.

The Tasman, built on a KIA Special Vehicles base platform with a gross vehicle weight of 3,500 kilograms and fitted with a specialized military superstructure, made its debut carrying Allen Control Systems’ Bullfrog counter-drone weapon station, integrated through a consortium that also includes COBBS Industries BV, Metz Engineering, and BeephoniX Defense & Security.

Dutch Military Vehicles, known in the Netherlands defense market as DMV, is a specialist Dutch manufacturer that designs and produces custom military vehicle configurations, adapting commercial and light tactical platforms to meet specific operational requirements. The company has previously supplied vehicles to the Royal Netherlands Marine Corps, working within a national defense industrial base that combines domestic engineering expertise with foreign platform integration. The DMV Tasman represents the company’s latest product, arriving at a moment when European militaries are urgently seeking light, mobile counter-drone platforms that can be procured and fielded faster than traditional defense programs allow.

The base vehicle draws on KIA Special Vehicles’ experience of more than five decades building purpose-modified platforms for defense and government customers. The Tasman has undergone extensive durability and performance testing and is intended for challenging terrains, with military-specific features including blackout control, snorkel capability, reinforced steel bumpers, antenna systems, a winch, and an auxiliary electric power supply. Its modular architecture allows rapid reconfiguration across mission types, which makes it a practical foundation for a vehicle that must function both as a mobility platform and a weapons carrier without sacrificing off-road performance.

The counter-drone system mounted on the DMV Tasman is the Bullfrog autonomous weapon station, developed by Allen Control Systems, an American defense technology company. Bullfrog is a lightweight autonomous defense system, weighing under 400 pounds, that operates on 24-volt DC power and is designed to detect, identify, and neutralize enemy unmanned aerial vehicles, making it straightforward to integrate with standard NATO vehicles. Rather than relying on radar, which would emit signals that could betray a vehicle’s position, Bullfrog uses passive sensing with a maximum effective range of 800 meters against Group 1 through Group 3 drone threats, covering the full spectrum of small commercial quadcopters through larger tactical unmanned systems that have dominated recent battlefield reporting from Ukraine and the Middle East.

The system pairs AI-enabled computer vision with a standard M240 7.62mm machine gun, allowing autonomous detection, tracking, and engagement while keeping a human in the authorization loop. That combination of autonomy and human oversight addresses one of the central concerns that European defense ministries have raised about fully autonomous lethal systems, and it positions Bullfrog within the emerging consensus around supervised autonomous weapons that NATO nations have been working toward. The cost per engagement has been reported to be as little as $10 per kill, a figure that cuts directly to the economic logic of counter-drone defense: if an adversary can field hundreds of cheap drones, the defending force needs an engagement cost that does not bankrupt it faster than the attacker can resupply.

During Project Convergence Capstone 5 at Fort Irwin, California in early 2025, Bullfrog engaged its largest drone swarm to date and confirmed kills on all seven targets within range during a breach scenario, with more than 40 soldiers from multiple specialties qualifying on the system in under 30 minutes. The U.S. Army has since evaluated it on M1A2 Abrams tanks and M2A4 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles as part of broader efforts to harden armored formations against drone threats. Bringing that system to a European light vehicle platform, sized and configured for Netherlands Ministry of Defence requirements, is the specific contribution that the DMV-led consortium is offering.

The roles of Metz Engineering and BeephoniX Defense & Security in the integrated system are not detailed in the LinkedIn announcements, and the consortium has not publicly specified what each company contributes to the final configuration beyond the vehicle and weapon station. What the posts do confirm is that the ministry audience responded positively, and that DMV plans to demonstrate the vehicle at multiple locations in the coming months, suggesting the company intends to use the Tasman as a platform for broader market development rather than pursuing a single customer relationship.

The drone threat driving this effort is not hypothetical for the Netherlands or its allies. Russian use of first-person-view kamikaze drones and Iranian-designed Shahed loitering munitions against Ukrainian ground forces has transformed how NATO planners think about vehicle survivability, and the lessons have been absorbed quickly. Light tactical vehicles operating without organic counter-drone capability are vulnerable in ways that were not fully appreciated five years ago, and the window for incremental responses has closed. The DMV Tasman, fitted with a system that has already proven itself in American field evaluations and presented directly to the ministry that would have to buy it, is an answer to a question the Netherlands Army is very much still asking.